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In your briefing today:

• Audit Scotland delivers (another) damning verdict, saying “The Promise” to young people in care is at risk

• Can Kemi Badenoch revive her Conservative party with her speech today?

• Steve Gerrard tops Ibrox shortlist. But does he want to come back to Glasgow?

📣 A lack of leadership threatens to ensure “The Promise” - Nicola Sturgeon’s vow to transform the experiences of young people in care - is at risk of being broken.

That’s the verdict of a damning Audit Scotland report which says, five years on and halfway to its 2030 deadline, “there is still confusion about what different bodies should be doing to deliver the changes needed”. Only £148 million from a £500 million fund has been handed out ahead of a 2026 deadline.

“From the outset, there was no assessment of what resources and skills were needed to deliver The Promise by 2030, or how success would be defined or measured,” the agency says. It has given ministers and COSLA six months to act. (Herald £) (Mail) (Audit Scotland: Read the report)

📣 Prosecutors in the US claim a Libyan man has freely confessed to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, along with other attacks on Americans, including an attempt to assassinate a US politician.

But Abu Agila Mas'ud Kheir al-Marimi, known as Mas’ud, says he was forced to admit his role in bringing down Pan Am 103 over the Scottish town, and his lawyers are trying to stop the interview from being used as evidence in his trial in Washington next year. (BBC)

📣 The case of two men accused of spying for China collapsed, it has been claimed, because prosecutors could not obtain evidence from the government.

The Director of Public Prosecutions, the UK’s most senior prosecutor, said charges were dropped last month despite there being sufficient evidence to prosecute Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry. (BBC)

• “'Kow-tow' Keir Starmer's new surrender and how China was given a free pass to spy on Britain” (Mail)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Scottish businesses are gloomy about the immediate future, with four in five of them expecting to see weak or very weak growth over the next year according to research by the Fraser of Allander Institute. (Mail) (Fraser of Allander Institute)

📣 Hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters gathered yesterday at Glasgow University’s campus, despite calls for them to avoid protests on the second anniversary of the October 7 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas.

• “Masked students” standing in the campus’s cloisters displayed a message saying “glory to our martyrs” (The Sun)

📣 Edinburgh’s housing convener is likely to be sacked by her Labour colleagues after suggesting Edinburgh’s affordable homes allocation be cut, to encourage more development. Lezley Marion Cameron, also the city’s deputy lord provost, has been told she will be sacked if she does not resign by today. (The Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Scottish schools are too soft on unruly pupils, according to teachers taking part in a survey organised by the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association union. Only 22% thought their school had clear consequences for troublemakers, while “nurturing approaches” and “restorative practices” were widespread. (The Times £)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 Kemi Badenoch will announce a new “golden rule” for the economy in her conference speech this morning, as she attempts to restore the Conservative Party’s credibility and secure her own position as leader of the party. (Independent)

• Spectres of Farage and Thatcher haunt Tories: analysis below ⬇️

📣 Keir Starmer says the UK will not relax visa rules for India. He was speaking before arriving in the country to mark the signing of a new trade agreement between the countries. (BBC)

📣 Millions of UK drivers who were victims of mis-sold car finance could get £700 payouts, with around 40% of finance deals made since 2007 eligible for compensation. (BBC)

📣 The world has enjoyed the sight of a dazzline “supermoon” this week, with stunning photographs taken of it rising above landmarks. (BBC)

📣 The US Government shutdown has moved into its second week, with 750,000 furloughed workers not being guaranteed back pay, the Trump administration has confirmed. The US Senate has failed to pass a budget after a fifth attempt. (Guardian)

SPORT

⚽️ As speculation reaches fever pitch, Rangers are still waiting on confirmation that former manager Steven Gerrard is interested in a return to Ibrox. The former Liverpool captain, who steered the Glasgow club to its 55th title, is on the shortlist to replace Russell Martin, but is said to have concerns about the quality of the squad. (BBC)

• Gerrard has given an interview in which he says his previous time at Rangers saw him and the club a “perfect match” (The Sun)

• Former Rangers player Greg Stewart reckons Rangers’ owners will need to put together quite the sales pitch to lure a top manager in (Daily Record)

• Russell Martin was pictured taking a wild water dip in Loch Lomond yesterday after being sacked. He’d taken the Rangers team there last month. (The Daily Record has the exclusive)

⚽️ Scotland and Aston Villa star John McGinn has been explaining how he “got his mojo back” after becoming exhausted at the end of last season. (Daily Mail)

IDEAS
The spectres of Farage and Thatcher looming, Badenoch prepares for another go at giving Tories fresh impetus

🗣️ The Conservative Party wraps up its annual conference today with a keynote speech from leader Kemi Badenoch, and while it’s fair to say the conference has not gone badly, it’s also fair to say expectations were low… and it has hardly been a breakthrough, 15 months on from its resounding General Election defeat.

It’s been the year when the “bleak reality of opposition has set in” for the Conservatives, thinks the BBC’s Chris Mason. For, despite the near-monumental unpopularity of the Labour government, the Conservatives have become even less popular themselves.

The spectre of the rapidly-rising Reform, and the “steady drip” of Conservatives joining them, has haunted the party. MPs are already sufficiently anxious to be suggesting electoral pacts with the upstart party. Polling lies at 16%.

One of its problems has been the long wait for new leader Kemi Badenoch to announce any new policies. That’s changed this conference, with a welter of new ideas - from a promise to leave the European Court of Human Rights to a £5,000 tax rebate for young people in their first job, to help them buy their first home.

During Badenoch’s silence, rivals have flourished - none more than Robert Jenrick, who has “stolen the limelight” at the Conference with “the punchiest speech of the event”, according to the Spectator’s James Heale, or a speech that fuelled “toxic nationalism” according to the Guardian.

Either way, it left Badenoch looking weaker: a leader who has to tell Sky News that “Robert Jenrick is not the leader of the Conservative Party” is, you can be sure, struggling for authority.

Badenoch will offer up more today in her second big speech of the conference, due around 11am. Today’s will have an economic theme: a commitment to a “golden rule” to return half of all savings made by a future Tory government to reducing the deficit.

It’s a straightforward attempt to win back economic credibilty after the twin disasters of Brexit and Liz Truss. Badenoch is invoking the memory of Margaret Thatcher as she attempts to win back the party, writes Philip Johnston in The Telegraph (£). What she really needs is an economic crisis, he says.

“The Tories cannot wish this on the country but it is their best hope of survival since it would throw the cold light of scrutiny onto Reform’s policies which the party will find it hard to withstand,” he suggests. “If the country is seriously spooked by a debt crisis with all its attendant misery, would voters really turn to a populist party whose ability to handle it is so uncertain?”

Observers of politics elsewhere - France, in particular - might raise issue with the assumption in that question, of course. Voters overseas seem very willing to reach for the untested in an attempt to improve their lot.

For Alwyn Turner, also in the Telegraph (£), the party’s great sin has been to fail to read the country’s mood, ending up a high-tax, high-spend, “and above all high-immigration government.

“None of that was noticeably conservative but, much worse, it was a political misjudgment, because the country was drifting to the right,” he writes.

All the pundits would agree: the Conservatives need to find their mojo, and fast, if they’re to stand a chance of fending off Reform at the next election. Even Polly Toynbee in the Guardian agrees: “Britain needs the Conservative party.

“That’s a line I never expected to write,” she says. “So it should be a joy to read its obituary everywhere, as it apparently faces ‘oblivion’, ‘the abyss’ and ‘extinction’.

“The prospect of Britain without a Tory party is hard to grasp,” she says. “But we may miss them if they are replaced with something worse. The next iteration of the right risks being the Trumpist, foreigner-persecuting world of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.”

One wonders just how many of the audience watching Badenoch in Manchester today will think that such a bad thing.

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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